Actually, I think this is important to every entrepreneur serious about their business. Otherwise, how are you going to make decisions on which measures you should focus your limited attention on?

When making goals, the most important thing is to ask yourself:

Where do I want to be one year from now?

Having a clear vision of where you want to go makes it much, much easier to take actions that bring you there. Don’t just set vague New Year’s resolutions like “I want to make more money” or “I want go get healthier” — have a clear target in mind! Next year, you then can (and should) retrospect on how well you did.

Also, make sure to share your goals with friends (or publicly)! The extra accountability of telling someone else makes it much more painful to slack off on them, which really helps to follow through.

But how do you actually formalize and write down these goals? In this post, we’ll use the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework, which were originally a practice at Intel, but have since spread to companies like Google, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What are OKRs?

The principle is simple: First, you define objectives that represent your high-level goals. For each objective, you then come up with key resultsthat contribute to it. These need to be measurable, as they will be used for scoring: At the end of the planning period (usually a quarter or a year), you review your key results and assign each of them a score between 0 and 1 based on how well you performed on that metric. Weighting all the key result scores of an objective by priority and taking the average then gives you the objective’s score.

A score of 1 isn’t desirable, though — it indicates that the goals were not ambitious enough. Achieving a score of around 0.7 is considered optimal , meaning that the goals are high but not unreasonably so.

By the way, at Google the company-wide OKRs and the company’s subsequent performance on them are shared with all employees. This provides some extra accountability and helps keep the employees

OKRs are not set in stone, though — they can and will change over time as the demands on your business change.

Here are my OKRs for the upcoming year. Hopefully they can help you define your own goals!

Objective 1: Grow the Business

Increase yearly profit (revenue minus expenses) before tax to XXX € for the whole year, YYY € in the last 3 non-promo/non-launch months

Revenue OKRs would be obfuscated at Google and I’d rather not share the numbers here, either. We’re talking about a 60–100% increase over today’s numbers, though.

While very measurable, this metric is not so actionable. To achieve the result, lots of small steps need to be taken over the course of the year that all contribute a tiny bit.

Grow timingapp.com’s average daily visitors to 150 in the last quarter

Currently, this number hovers around 60. The following key results should help with achieving this oral, though.

Get 12 new articles mentioning Timing

This can hopefully be achieved by carefully pitching bloggers and other influencers.

Rank consistently on the first page of Google’s search results for “mac time tracker”

This could be huge for the organic inbound traffic for Timing.

Release Timing 2

Without a clear specification of what that release is to contain, this one is quite spongy. On the other hand, speccing everything out beforehand would be very “waterfall” and not very “agile” 😉 I have already collected a ton of ideas for the update, but which ones will make it into the final version (and in what form) will very much depend on feedback of my beta testers.

Grow the Timing newsletter to 2000 subscribers

Currently, the newsletter has 420 subscribers acquired over the course of almost four years, so it will need to grow much faster than before. To accomplish this, I’m going to distribute much more useful content to the newsletter and give away some content to subscribers. Giving away a 10% discount code to subscribers this month has already improved growth substantially.

Conduct at least four sponsorships or other substantial promotional measures

The first one (sponsoring Six Colors) is already planned for January. Bundles don’t count (unless they’re extremely popular), as they often have virtually no impact outside a little extra revenue.

Objective 2: Provide useful information

This area is fairly new to me, as I’m only getting started with blogging and content marketing, but it is already starting to feel increasingly important to me.

Create 25 pieces of original content

This includes posts like this as well as articles on the Timing blog (which doesn’t exist yet) and possible email courses for newsletter subscribers. Indie Weekly episodes are not included unless they include substantial amounts of original content.

Indie Weekly is a newsletter for independent app developers, with a focus on marketing and Indie life as opposed to the technical sides of development (for which there already are plenty of other newsletters). The first episode is currently scheduled for the week of January 11th and will be sent to the about 40 people who have already subscribed.

Although Indie weekly is about business, I see it as an effort for the community, so it’s not part of the “Business” objective.

Objective 3: Personal Development

Not all goals need to be about work — never neglect growing yourself! Anyone can build a business, but the only person who can actively make life more awesome for you is yourself.

This objective might actually be the least ambitious of the three (for now), but I might add more points to it over the course of the year. Here are some other personal development goals that might be suitable for you:

Come up with at least one more side project

I love side projects as a hobby. Building something usable from start to finish and releasing it, all in a few days, feels amazing. And if you’re starting to feel burned out from your main projects, they can also be a welcome distraction.

Attend at least 4 conferences

I’ve had a great time with amazing people at all the conferences I’ve been to, so I’d like to repeat that experience. Plus, every time I come back from a conference I’m super pumped and motivated to get back to doing great work.

Give at least one talk (e.g. at a meetup or a conference)

I’d love to share the experiences I’ve made with more people and help them grow without making the same mistakes I did. For this, I might give a talk about my first several months as a full-time Indie developer, for example.

Spend at least 28 days in foreign countries

This can be accomplished by going on vacation, but I’m also considering checking into a surf office or nomad house for a few weeks.

Get fitter

There’s finally an affordable gym close to my place, so I took the opportunity and signed up for it. I mostly want to focus on cardio and condition training in the beginning with some core strength for windsurfing.

In order to have a clear target in mind, I came up with a few vanity fitness goals:

Do 50 push-ups in a row (currently around 30)

Do 15 pull-ups in a row (currently around 6)

Get visible abs

Conclusion

Each of these key results by itself should be fairly achievable over the course of a year (except for maybe the revenue one, which is harder to control as it depends on many other factors), but their sheer number will make it hard to accomplish them all. That’s fine, though — I’m aiming for the aforementioned 70% completion rate.

I mostly focused on the first half of the year, during which I plan to double down on Timing and create a big update for the app. In the second half, I hope to dedicate more time to PocketCAS, which so far has no goals on this list.